Life’s Compass

It won’t come as any surprise to those reading this blog that technological civilization and the ecosystem are incongruent. In short-hand what this means is that they cannot co-exist for long. Again, using high-powered logic, what this means is that either one or the other or both will collapse. The ecosystem has several advantages, being fueled by solar energy and adapted and integrated into existing biospheric chemistry and climatology. The human technological civilization on the other hand is neither adapted nor integrated into the existing relationships and is in the process of upsetting a delicate homeostasis. The cancer of technological civilization has one goal, passing as much material and energy through its metabolism as possible in the shortest period of time possible using a myriad of ever improving tools to accomplish that goal. Eat and grow and shit. Unfortunately there’s only so much for a technological cancer to eat, only so far it can grow and only so much shit it can create before it destroys itself and its parent system. Humans, manning their RNA stations in this cancer want more, always more – more salary,more sales, more jobs, more profits, more entertainment, a bigger house, another car, cheaper gas and naturally they think new high efficiency fracking tools and processes will deliver the goods.

Being dissipative, humans really must keep their eyes on the ball and their brain helps with this greatly, maintaining attention and focus upon getting more of the good stuff while avoiding anything which may garner the attention of the amygdala. Humans have no choice but to focus upon getting more and the brain helps by preferentially focusing attention on those things that can release a little dopamine into the neuronal synapses. What would happen if humans weren’t preoccupied with eating, sex, and making money? They would waste their energies on trivial pursuits and eventually die of starvation. Evolved brains don’t give humans a choice. All information coming from the senses goes through the limbic system’s thalamus first. Lets consider it a primitive brain, one that can think at only a subconscious level but being tuned into reward. It’s where our senses were first and continue to be attached first, before conscious thought or language evolved. It pretty much keeps us focused on things that result in dopamine release or rewards. It makes the emotional decisions before sending direction to the prefrontal cortex which must conceive a strategy to obtain the reward, especially taking into consideration complicating social factors and potential pitfalls. There are dangers in the environment, like mad dogs, bankers, murderers, spiders and snakes. The brain has another limbic organ, the amygdala that can attach the emotion of fear to various memories so that you’ll avoid them in the future. You watch a friend being mauled by a mad dog, so you form an emotional memory and avoid mad dogs from then on. That doesn’t require conscious deliberation either. So each day you stumble along searching for rewards and avoiding danger, running on automatic for the most part. Perhaps you have half a dozen strategies – for advancement at your job which includes schmoozing the boss and gossiping about coworkers, or perhaps you have a strategy to invest your way to early retirement and an entirely different strategy to gain admission to heaven by following the ten commandments. The prefrontal cortex can come up with all kinds of strategies for obtaining rewards distant in space and time but for the most part it cannot be bothered with thinking about unrewarding things like death and climate change or the poor people in the third world. It must seek positive reward on a continual basis or literally be left in the dust by the competition.

To make a long story short, when evolution equipped the human limbic automatons with technology, it set us on a course for explosive growth and involuntary self-destruction. So dispel your fears, run over that spider and snake on the road and propel yourself towards those dreamed-of rewards, because to the human brain, that’s all that can really matter.

thoughts on “Life’s Compass”

This really does explain life in modern consumer culture. Life as simple limbic system reward seeking in all things big and small. The ecosystem will no doubt collapse in its ability to support us, but fortunately is adaptive to whatever comes next. I think focusing on the simple ecological model of how our system operates – eat/consume, grow, shit/eliminate – is the key, for those who are willing to think, anyway. The system stripped of all its confounding complexity really is that simple, and it doesn’t take a proverbial rocket scientist to figure out that unless that loop is closed somehow (and no, recycling some ridiculously small portion of our overall resource use, essentially for marketing purposes, will not do it), it will eventually dissipate.

But with each succeeding generation we become more immersed in the limbic reward system of our dominant cultural paradigm, so I must agree, I think the coming civilizational crash and burn is not only unavoidable at this point, but will likely be perversely enjoyable for many.

I wish it could go on forever with a few adjustments, but that’s not in the cards. People don’t think about the scope and rapidity of the damage they’re doing. As in Plato’s Cave, they’re just grabbing at the shadows on the wall and will never turn around to see the small group of people, the media and owners, standing between them and the fire, distorting the shadows to manipulate their behaviors, turning them into mindless consumers and passive citizens. But even most of the people doing the manipulating will be caught off-guard when the fire really does go out.

I think most of us these days are existentially torn between the comfort of wanting it to go on (basically, just inertia), and wanting it all to explode in some sort of grand spectacle (presumably of course, benefiting, or at least vindicating them).

I often ruminate on that myself. Am I just a bored, over privileged, over educated, and overpaid member of America’s burgeoning disaffected under-overclass? It’s a fair critique, and one I’m sensitive to. Are we, in our relative leisure and ability to over consume just engaging in so much liberal navel gazing concerning the evils of the system that gave us the very right to do so in the first place, perhaps out of some misguided sense of being left out of the bounties of the truly BIG winners among us?

I think I’ll just leave that question hanging for now while I continue to ruminate on it some more. I don’t for a minute think that I’m guilty of the worst of it, but I think it’s a fair question that needs to be considered by all of us individually in the fullness of time.

And the barbecue must have been awesome. I can imagine their prefrontal cortices planning the attack with many grunts and hand gestures and the visions of mastodon barbecue sending them across hill and dale like barking dogs in search of their meat. I was wondering why the African and Indian elephants survived. Maybe the Mastadons were just real friendly and trusting. Big mistake. “Hey look, there’s one of those stupid Neanderthals, LETS’S GET HIM.”

ROFL. I too have wondered how the elephants made it this long. Maybe they taste skanky? Co evolution?
I notice large sections of the populous are regressing back to grunts and gestures to communicate or at least the 21st century equivalent of it. On the – all problems can be fixed with Austrian economics web site – Zero Hedge, they often try to explain their position with just a couple of graphs or six pictures side by each and the only text says, “presented with no comment.” I call that cyber grunting.

The limbic impulse will not be denied. Too bad it’s below the level of consciousness. There’s still plenty of room remaining in the Chinese petri dish, or at least they think so. But it’s not so rational as that, but rather just another case of we’re going to do what feels good and our limbic systems say this feels good. No matter how large they think they can make the petri dish, it will be incrementally filled until starvation, cancer, epidemics, revolutions and the like substantially increase the death rate over the birth rate. Humans really can’t control themselves, never could. Nature will find solutions.

The popular response among the academic intelligentsia set these days is that “as nations become more prosperous their populations naturally choose to limit their numbers to maximize their current and presumed future utility.” Or something like that. But of course given all of the non-western cultural sensibilities out there, that’s rarely the case, is it? And even when it is, I seriously doubt it ever stops population growth shy of the overshoot phase. Something we can no longer afford in the least at this stage of human infestation.

Going back to Dr. Albert Bartlett’s exponential function videos, the distinguished UC Boulder Professor really had it all nailed. The numbers are as simple to understand as their logic is inescapable.

At about 43:30 into the video an audience member named Bill posits that it’s the triune brain that prevents us from doing the right thing, the right thing being an abandonment of growth and the pursuit of wealth. As Dr. Mobus said, the neocortex is capable of making models of reality and as I’ve observed, 99% of those models are created to somehow enhance growth and create wealth. Why? Because those are the goals instilled by nature into all life, to struggle mightily, compete, throw the genetic dice into the next generation and then let nature take its course. This works great within an ecosystem where other competing species are eliminating the unfit human genetic combinations. However, having evolved into using new information and tools distinct from DNA and proteins, humans continue to behave in the same manner as before they escaped from the ecosystem with unrelenting competition to grab and convert as much wealth as possible while also for many, reproducing beyond replacement levels.

The technological conversion which took place mostly in the newest part of the brain, the neocortex, did not happen simultaneously with an adequate conversion of the limbic system. The result is that we grow like a cancer until everything is converted to stranded technological wealth. Then, when we try to return to our where we previously fit within the ecosystem, we will find that we have burned our ecological bridges. What does the cancer want more of? More money, more growth, more jobs.

As an example of limbic activity controlling rational thought, Dr. Mobus, in response to someone asking why people can understand what needs to be done but don’t do it. Dr. Mobus said he bought a motorcycle to cut down on carbon emissions. Was it really to cut down on carbon emissions or was it to save money on gasoline and enjoy the fresh air? The limbic system will often make a decision based purely upon emotional satisfying criteria and then the prefrontal cortex will invent a socially valuable reason for doing so. (Maybe he did buy it to save on emissions). He might also have said, “I really haven’t done a damn thing, but I bought this motorcycle and I love to feel the fresh air when I’m riding and it sure saves on the gas bill. And by the way it has the secondary added benefit of reducing carbon emissions. A combination of benefits, personal and societal may have flipped his decision switch to buy one.

A physician might say, “ I got into medicine to help people.” But in reality and at a subconscious level they got into medicine because there was lots of money to be made, everyone worships doctors and their mother said she would get our the whip if not accepted to medical school.

Who wants another cigarette? Not the prefronal cortex that knows it causes cancer, but the limbic system would sure like to have another because more importantly, it feels good.